School Bussing: History Presents a Racial School Integration Challenge Today

School Bussing! The Kamala Harris and Joe Biden interchange caught people’s attention. The issue itself, however, is not just old history but a contemporary challenge. Will all children have equal, excellent education together in their community public schools?

Sixty-five years ago the U.S. Supreme Court declared the doctrine of “separate but equal” unconstitutional (Brown vs. the Board of Education) and invalidated racial segregation in public schools, paving the way for integration in nearly every aspect of American life.  That was 1954.

For years, however, thousands of neighborhood schools remained segregated due to demographics; children who lived in predominantly black neighborhoods still did not go to the same schools as white children, and vice versa.

In the 1968-69 school year in the Charlotte-Mecklenburg school system in North Carolina, 14,000 of the 24,000 black students had attended schools that were at least 99 percent black. The NAACP challenged the school board and won the case in 1969: the school district must use bussing to achieve racial diversity in its schools. On April 20, 1971, the United States Supreme Court upheld the use of bussing to achieve racial desegregation in schools.

There were plans that called for the bussing of black students to suburban schools as well as the bussing of white suburban students to city schools throughout the country. Many of us who lived through that era remember school bussing of black children to white schools.  However, in most places white parents were enraged at the thought of bussing their children to predominately black schools.  Our family was living in a predominately black and Hispanic neighborhood at the 1970’s. Our children were the only white children in the school and so it remained.

This was also the time when four million whites moved from cities to suburbs.  Between 1960 and 1977 this white flight contributed to nearly all-white suburbs and predominantly black inner cities. White fear of people of color! Anti-bussing activism drew on the “dangers” of racial integration. Opposition to bussing was about preserving racial divisions.

School bussing was a predominant racial issue in the 1970’s.  In 1974 a second Supreme Court decision declared that integration plans could not extend beyond district boundaries and its ruling continues to shape American schools to this day. Although our society in many respects has become more integrated, in many other ways we returned to separate and unequal.

We know that today schools are more segregated by race, class and economic status than they were 65 years ago.  In intervening years people have chosen alternatives to public schools, citing all sorts of reasons. Meanwhile public school resources and teachers’ pay suffer. Some people raise the false alternate question, “Which is more important, “achieving diversity or raising academic standards?” Both of course. (That question assumes we lower standards by having white people join people of color in living and learning together.)

The issues of fear, discrimination by race and class, and the economic gap, remain.  And so does the challenge: for all children to have equal excellent education together in public, community schools. This is our nation’s need.

Note: The National Education Association (NEA) hosted its annual assembly in Houston July 5 with the “Strong Public Schools Presidential Forum” with Democratic presidential candidates as the centerpiece of its meeting.